Vice story on 'white, male, slim, and young' body bias in medical textbooks mocked: 'Dumbest woke criticism I have ever seen'

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Liberal media outlet Vice was mocked on Thursday over a story explaining how medical textbooks feature too many bodies that are "white, male, slim, and young."

Rhiannon Parker, a researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia, has done extensive research on the apparent bias medical textbooks have had over the decades, "analyzing more than 6,000 images from 17 anatomy textbooks published between 2008 and 2013," the story noted.

Her 2014 study concluded that only 36 percent of those images were identifiably female when she'd expected a "much bigger improvement on representation" from a 1994 study that showed just 32 percent were female.

A Vice article on bodies in medical textbooks triggered mockery.

Another observation Parker made in her study was that 76 percent of the male bodies featured in the medical textbooks were white while 86 percent of female bodies were white. She also found that only 2.7 percent were visibly disabled and only 2.2 percent were elderly.

"You don't have any elderly in these textbooks even though the elderly need more healthcare," Parker told Vice. "I think that was quite surprising to me, that those types of representations weren't really in there."

In a 2018 survey of anatomy students from the School of Medicine at the University of Wollongong, she found a significant amount of "implicit bias," but noted that the bodies featured did not affect their "explicit bias."

Vice shared the story on Twitter, where it caught lots of attention.

"Bodies in medical textbooks are overwhelmingly white, male, slim, and young," Vice tweeted.

The tweet was signficantly ratio'd, meaning it received more replies than likes and retweets. Many slammed the story, including conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who suggested it the "dumbest woke criticism" he had ever seen.

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Vice did not respond to Fox News' request for comment.